Posts Tagged 'Shopping'

Editor’s Note: Each month in 2015, we’ll be celebrating the cornucopia of reasons why the cloud reigns supreme — from customer tales to cloud insights and everything in between. During February, the notorious month of love, we’re showing you exactly why we heart the cloud. Follow all the fun on your favorite social networks by keeping tabs on #SLCloudLove.

Clicking Add to Cart—that’s how I like to shop these days. Brick and mortar shopping might be retail therapy, but the convenience and online discounts at my fingertips appeases my inherently lazy human tendencies.

With more and more online e-stores cropping up, physical retail outlets can no longer ignore not having an online presence, including a mobile-friendly website and ordering system. The numbers say it all:

e-Commerce sales are expected to be more than $1.7 trillion with mobile commerce accounting for nearly $300 billion in sales. Read more here.

In India, the e-commerce market is expected to reach $6 billion in 2015—a 70 percent increase over 2014. Read more here.

The Chinese government is allowing foreign-owned e-commerce companies to operate in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone as part of a pilot program; the market is expected to see a lot of inflow despite tough competition from local giants like JD.com and Alibaba. Read more here.

The six largest Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) reached $7 billion in total revenues in 2013 and will grow at a CAGR of 37.6 percent to reach $34.5 billion by 2018. Read more here.

So when I recently attended the iMedia Online Retail Summit, I jumped at the chance to discuss with the audience the benefits of moving their e-Commerce business to the cloud as well as discussing some very interesting stories about e-commerce platforms based in Asia.

Here is a quick overview of the presentation:

e-Commerce on Cloud
There is no denying the high reliance on IT. e-Commerce portals need to handle a rising number of Internet users, provide a secure and convenient online payment system, and support lucrative offers by e-tailors. The problem is that the utilization is unpredictable (except holiday season when it is predictably unpredictable!). If your site slows or freezes, especially during a sale, it can be compared to shutting your store on Black Friday. Customers will abandon their carts, and the social media sites will erupt with negative remarks—recall the recent headliner, Flipkart faces social media backlash over ‘crashes’, ‘misleading’ pricing.

The dilemma: Over-allocate and over-pay for unused resources just to manage sudden shopping spurts, or under-allocate resources and suffer the wrath of the new-age shopper. Cloud resources seems like a natural solution when you don’t want to be stuck in the either-or situation. But, not just any cloud solution will do. If a provider has a lock-in period or contract (even if it’s short-term)—well that's not really cloud, now is it?

Similarly the cloud solution is not justifying your investments if it is going to charge you every time you, as an internal user, try to move your virtual servers across your operating geos to get closer to customers. For example: your next online sale is targeted at holiday shoppers in Singapore or you want to carry out test runs for your Amsterdam customer base, but your core virtual server originally resides in Melbourne.

Solving e-Commerce Challenges with SoftLayer
I like using this image as it gives a great view into how SoftLayer can help e-commerce and e-tail customers manage day-to-day scenarios. From seasonal site traffic spikes to needing backup solutions for business continuity, SoftLayer has a solution for it. Plus SoftLayer brings advantages gleaned from working with e-commerce giants over the past decade.

Walking the Talk—Businesses that are Leveraging Cloud . . . Successfully!
In October 2014, Natali Ardianto, Tiket.com's CTO, gave a keynote address at Cloud Expo Asia about building one of Indonesia’s largest online travel and entertainment portals. When it first launched a few years ago, Tiket.com faced TCP, DoS, and DDoS attacks while hosting unsuccessfully on two different IaaS providers. The company needed a highly stable infrastructure delivering consistent performance and reliable support to ensure site uptime and a smooth end-user experience. Tiket.com chose SoftLayer to support its site. Running on SoftLayer bare metal servers, Tiket.com systems are now able to handle more than 300 API requests per minute and has experienced a 75 percent cost savings. Watch Natali's video where he discusses his cloud experience, or read the detailed case study.

HotelsCombined.com is an impressive collection of over 5 million real-time international hotel deals, a database of more than 800,000 properties and an affiliate base of over 20,000 companies. The company uses a combination of SoftLayer bare metal and virtual servers, load balancers, and redundant iSCSI storage. This provides the company with several thousand cores of processing power and enables it to remain lean and move quickly. The company also uses the SoftLayer infrastructure to provide real-time predictive models to the website and to support its business intelligence tools. Read the detailed case study.

While at the conference, I met up with a great bunch of entrepreneurs, startups and giants from across Asia. It was amazing to hear about the journey and growth plans of Rakuten, Life Project, Qoo10, Telunjuk, Seroyamart.com, and many more. Keep your ears open this coming year. The e-commerce landscape is rapidly progressing and these guys are weaving the fabric.

With a little one on the way, I've been spending a good amount of my free time starting to search for a new home for my growing family. While the search continues, I've learned a thing or two about what to look for and what should be done before taking the plunge, and as I've gone through the process, I can't help but notice lot of parallels to what it's like to purchase a new server:

It's an Investment

Just like purchasing a new home, deciding to purchase a server is a huge investment. As you start shopping around, the costs may seem staggering, and while most servers don't cost as much as a small home, your new server will be your business's new home online. When you consider the revenue your site will generate (and the potential cost of not being able to properly support demand), you won't want to skimp on the details. The truth is that like any investment, you can reap great rewards with proper planning and execution.

You Have to Know What You Need

One of the best tips I've incorporated in my home-buying process is the need to differentiate what you want, what you need, and what you can live without. Unless you're royalty, you're likely living on a budget. As cool as it would be to live in a 10-bedroom mansion with an indoor Olympic size pool, there's a lot there that I don't need. That sort of home palace also falls way outside of my personal budget. The same could be said about a business.

I've heard plenty of stories about companies who slash their IT budgets in order to cut costs, and even the greatest IT departments have to live within their budgets. As you're determining what your next server will be, you need to understand the purpose (and needs) of your workload: Will it be database server? An application server? Will it be an additional web head? Are you using it for mass storage? You need to plan accordingly. I'm sure you'd want a new Xeon E5-2600 server with all of the bells and whistles, but if you don't need that kind of performance, you're likely just going to burn through your budget quicker than you have to. Know your budget, know your needs and purchase your server accordingly.

You Should Get to Know the Neighborhood

I don't intend on purchasing a home in a high-crime area, nor do I plan on moving into a neighborhood with exorbitant HOA dues for services I don't intend to use. Your new server is going to have a "neighborhood" as well when it comes to the network it's connected to, so if you plan on outsourcing your IT infrastructure, you should do the same research.

You want your critical environments in a safe place, and the easiest way to get them in the right "neighborhood" is to work with a well-established host who's able to accommodate what you're doing. A $20/mo shared hosting account is great for a personal blog site, but it probably wouldn't be a good fit for a busy database server or front-end application servers for an application dependent on advertising for revenue. A mansion worth of furniture doesn't fit very well in a studio apartment.

You're Responsible for Maintenance

Ask any homeowner: Continuous improvements — as well as routine maintenance &mdashl are a requirement. Failure to take care of your property can result in fines and much more costly repairs down the road. Likewise with any server, you have to do your maintenance. Keep your software up to date, practice good security protocols, and continue to monitor for problems. If you don't, you could find yourself at the mercy of malicious activity or worse — catastrophic failure. Which leads me to ...

You Need Insurance Against Disaster

Homeowner's insurance protects you from disaster, and it provides indemnity in the event someone is hurt on your property. Sometimes additional insurance may be required. Many professionals recommend flood insurance to protect from flood damage not covered under a typical homeowner's insurance policy. Ask any systems administrator, and they'll tell you all about server insurance: BACKUPS. ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA!!! The wrong time to figure out that your backups weren't properly maintained is when you need them, more specifically in the event of a hardware failure. It's a fact of life: Hardware can fail. Murphy's Law would suggest it will fail at the worst possible time. Maintain your backups!

I can't claim that this is the guide to buying a server, but seeing the parallels with buying a new home might be a catalyst for you to look at the server-buying process in a different light. You should consider your infrastructure an asset before you simply consider it a cost.

It’s that time of year again. No, not time to spread joy and cheer to your family (it can be that, too), but rather the time of waiting in long lines when it’s freezing outside hoping to get a good deal or the perfect gift. It’s the holiday shopping season. With the holiday shopping season comes the holiday “holy cow it’s freezing cold out here” or the holiday “hey! that person just cut in line” season as well. Of course, one thing people need to remember this time of year is that it’s not about the shopping and spending money (Money? What money?) but rather it’s about spending time with family and looking back at the year that has passed. Of course, retailers and scammers would like you to think otherwise. They’re trying their hardest to get you to part with your hard earned money. What does this mean to you? It means that you have to watch out who you’re buying from and what websites you are giving your personal information to. This is the perfect season for scammers to get your grandparents to give up their personal information (and with it everything in their bank accounts). Of course, this is easily avoided. Most reputable websites will have SSL certificates from a reputable vendor. Being a customer of SoftLayer you are already aware of a (fairly) new service we offer… A short while back SoftLayer began to offer VeriSign and GeoTrust SSL certificates (for more information: http://www.softlayer.com/partners_geotrust.html). Simply making sure that the site you are buying from has a certificate installed like the ones we offer will help ensure that your information isn’t going to some thief hiding in his basement. What’s the moral of this story? (All Holiday stories have a moral…) Stay safe, be careful, and enjoy the holidays!